The turbine is a 65-foot prototype, built on a 1:8 scale at the University of Maine's Advanced Structures and Composites Center. It will be placed in the waters off the Maine coast later this month.

Composites Center Director, Habib Dagher says this first unveiling is just the beginning.

"Offshore wind is our largest untapped renewable resource in the state of Maine," Dagher said. "We have 156 gigawatts of offshore wind within 50 miles of our coast. That's the equivalent of 156 nuclear power plants worth of wind blowing off the coast of Maine."

After this week's unveiling, the turbine will be disassembled, trucked to Brewer and then reassembled at Cianbro's Modular Construction site.

Later this month, the turbine will be floated down the Penobscot River to its test site in the Gulf of Maine near Monhegan Island, where it will be monitored in preparation for a fullscale turbine project to follow in 2015.